OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Painless Breakups -- Efficient Demixing of Low Rank Matrices
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2017
Year: 2017

Assume we are given a sum of linear measurements of $s$ different rank-$r$ matrices of the form $y = \sum_{k=1}^{s} \mathcal{A}_k ({X}_k)$. When and under which conditions is it possible to extract (demix) the individual matrices ${X}_k$ from the single measurement vector ${y}$? And can we do the demixing numerically efficiently? We present two computationally efficient algorithms based on hard thresholding to solve this low rank demixing problem. We prove that under suitable conditions these algorithms are guaranteed to converge to the correct solution at a linear rate. We discuss applications in connection with quantum tomography and the Internet-of-Things. Numerical simulations demonstrate empirically the performance of the proposed algorithms.
Automatic Detection of Knee Joints and Quantification of Knee Osteoarthritis Severity using Convolutional Neural Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2017
Year: 2017

This paper introduces a new approach to automatically quantify the severity of knee OA using X-ray images. Automatically quantifying knee OA severity involves two steps: first, automatically localizing the knee joints; next, classifying the localized knee joint images. We introduce a new approach to automatically detect the knee joints using a fully convolutional neural network (FCN). We train convolutional neural networks (CNN) from scratch to automatically quantify the knee OA severity optimizing a weighted ratio of two loss functions: categorical cross-entropy and mean-squared loss. This joint training further improves the overall quantification of knee OA severity, with the added benefit of naturally producing simultaneous multi-class classification and regression outputs. Two public datasets are used to evaluate our approach, the Osteoarthritis Initiative (OAI) and the Multicenter Osteoarthritis Study (MOST), with extremely promising results that outperform existing approaches.
Approximation of Weighted Automata with Storage
Venue: arXiv cs.FL 2017
Year: 2017

We use a non-deterministic variant of storage types to develop a framework for the approximation of automata with storage. This framework is used to provide automata-theoretic views on the approximation of multiple context-free languages and on coarse-to-fine parsing.
An Evaluation of Digital Image Forgery Detection Approaches
Venue: arXiv cs.MM 2017
Year: 2017

With the headway of the advanced image handling software and altering tools, a computerized picture can be effectively controlled. The identification of image manipulation is vital in light of the fact that an image can be utilized as legitimate confirmation, in crime scene investigation, and in numerous different fields. The image forgery detection techniques intend to confirm the credibility of computerized pictures with no prior information about the original image. There are numerous routes for altering a picture, for example, resampling, splicing, and copy-move. In this paper, we have examined different type of image forgery and their detection techniques; mainly we focused on pixel based image forgery detection techniques.
Cohesion-based Online Actor-Critic Reinforcement Learning for mHealth Intervention
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2017
Year: 2017

In the wake of the vast population of smart device users worldwide, mobile health (mHealth) technologies are hopeful to generate positive and wide influence on people's health. They are able to provide flexible, affordable and portable health guides to device users. Current online decision-making methods for mHealth assume that the users are completely heterogeneous. They share no information among users and learn a separate policy for each user. However, data for each user is very limited in size to support the separate online learning, leading to unstable policies that contain lots of variances. Besides, we find the truth that a user may be similar with some, but not all, users, and connected users tend to have similar behaviors. In this paper, we propose a network cohesion constrained (actor-critic) Reinforcement Learning (RL) method for mHealth. The goal is to explore how to share information among similar users to better convert the limited user information into sharper learned policies. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first online actor-critic RL for mHealth and first network cohesion constrained (actor-critic) RL method in all applications. The network cohesion is important to derive effective policies. We come up with a novel method to learn the network by using the warm start trajectory, which directly reflects the users' property. The optimization of our model is difficult and very different from the general supervised learning due to the indirect observation of values. As a contribution, we propose two algorithms for the proposed online RLs. Apart from mHealth, the proposed methods can be easily applied or adapted to other health-related tasks. Extensive experiment results on the HeartSteps dataset demonstrates that in a variety of parameter settings, the proposed two methods obtain obvious improvements over the state-of-the-art methods.
Decentralized Periodic Event-Triggered Control with Quantization and Asynchronous Communication
Venue: arXiv cs.SY 2017
Year: 2017

Asynchronous decentralized event-triggered control (ADETC) is an implementation of controllers characterized by decentralized event generation, asynchronous sampling updates, and dynamic quantization. Combining those elements in ADETC results in a parsimonious transmission of information which makes it suitable for wireless networked implementations. We extend the previous work on ADETC by introducing periodic sampling, denoting our proposal asynchronous decentralized periodic event-triggered control (ADPETC), and study the stability and L2-gain of ADPETC for implementations affected by disturbances. In ADPETC, at each sampling time, quantized measurements from those sensors that triggered a local event are transmitted to a dynamic controller that computes control actions; the quantized control actions are then transmitted to the corresponding actuators only if certain events are also triggered for the corresponding actuator. The developed theory is demonstrated and illustrated via a numerical example.
Cooperative Abnormality Detection via Diffusive Molecular Communications
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2017
Year: 2017

In this paper, we consider abnormality detection via diffusive molecular communications (MCs) for a network consisting of several sensors and a fusion center (FC). If a sensor detects an abnormality, it injects into the medium a number of molecules which is proportional to the sensed value. Two transmission schemes for releasing molecules into the medium are considered. In the first scheme, referred to as DTM, each sensor releases a different type of molecule, whereas in the second scheme, referred to as STM, all sensors release the same type of molecule. The molecules released by the sensors propagate through the MC channel and some may reach the FC where the final decision regarding whether or not an abnormality has occurred is made. We derive the optimal decision rules for both DTM and STM. However, the optimal detectors entail high computational complexity as log-likelihood ratios (LLRs) have to be computed. To overcome this issue, we show that the optimal decision rule for STM can be transformed into an equivalent low-complexity decision rule. Since a similar transformation is not possible for DTM, we propose simple low-complexity sub-optimal detectors based on different approximations of the LLR. The proposed low-complexity detectors are more suitable for practical MC systems than the original complex optimal decision rule, particularly when the FC is a nano-machine with limited computational capabilities. Furthermore, we analyze the performance of the proposed detectors in terms of their false alarm and missed detection probabilities. Simulation results verify our analytical derivations and reveal interesting insights regarding the trade-off between complexity and performance of the proposed detectors and the considered DTM and STM schemes.
Rational Choice and Artificial Intelligence
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2017
Year: 2017

The theory of rational choice assumes that when people make decisions they do so in order to maximize their utility. In order to achieve this goal they ought to use all the information available and consider all the choices available to choose an optimal choice. This paper investigates what happens when decisions are made by artificially intelligent machines in the market rather than human beings. Firstly, the expectations of the future are more consistent if they are made by an artificially intelligent machine and the decisions are more rational and thus marketplace becomes more rational.
Automatic Argumentative-Zoning Using Word2vec
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2017
Year: 2017

In comparison with document summarization on the articles from social media and newswire, argumentative zoning (AZ) is an important task in scientific paper analysis. Traditional methodology to carry on this task relies on feature engineering from different levels. In this paper, three models of generating sentence vectors for the task of sentence classification were explored and compared. The proposed approach builds sentence representations using learned embeddings based on neural network. The learned word embeddings formed a feature space, to which the examined sentence is mapped to. Those features are input into the classifiers for supervised classification. Using 10-cross-validation scheme, evaluation was conducted on the Argumentative-Zoning (AZ) annotated articles. The results showed that simply averaging the word vectors in a sentence works better than the paragraph to vector algorithm and by integrating specific cuewords into the loss function of the neural network can improve the classification performance. In comparison with the hand-crafted features, the word2vec method won for most of the categories. However, the hand-crafted features showed their strength on classifying some of the categories.
Joint Design of Overlaid Communication Systems and Pulsed Radars
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2017
Year: 2017

The focus of this paper is on co-existence between a communication system and a pulsed radar sharing the same bandwidth. Based on the fact that the interference generated by the radar onto the communication receiver is intermittent and depends on the density of scattering objects (such as, e.g., targets), we first show that the communication system is equivalent to a set of independent parallel channels, whereby pre-coding on each channel can be introduced as a new degree of freedom. We introduce a new figure of merit, named the {\em compound rate}, which is a convex combination of rates with and without interference, to be optimized under constraints concerning the signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (including {\em signal-dependent} interference due to clutter) experienced by the radar and obviously the powers emitted by the two systems: the degrees of freedom are the radar waveform and the afore-mentioned encoding matrix for the communication symbols. We provide closed-form solutions for the optimum transmit policies for both systems under two basic models for the scattering produced by the radar onto the communication receiver, and account for possible correlation of the signal-independent fraction of the interference impinging on the radar. We also discuss the region of the achievable communication rates with and without interference. A thorough performance assessment shows the potentials and the limitations of the proposed co-existing architecture.
Smartphone Based Colorimetric Detection via Machine Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2017
Year: 2017

We report the application of machine learning to smartphone based colorimetric detection of pH values. The strip images were used as the training set for Least Squares-Support Vector Machine (LS-SVM) classifier algorithms that were able to successfully classify the distinct pH values. The difference in the obtained image formats was found not to significantly affect the performance of the proposed machine learning approach. Moreover, the influence of the illumination conditions on the perceived color of pH strips was investigated and further experiments were carried out to study effect of color change on the learning model. Test results on JPEG, RAW and RAW-corrected image formats captured in different lighting conditions lead to perfect classification accuracy, sensitivity and specificity, which proves that the colorimetric detection using machine learning based systems is able to adapt to various experimental conditions and is a great candidate for smartphone based sensing in paper-based colorimetric assays.
Inversion of Separable Kernel Operators in Coupled Differential-Functional Equations and Application to Controller Synthesis
Venue: arXiv cs.SY 2017
Year: 2017

This article presents the inverse of the kernel operator associated with the complete quadratic Lyapunov-Krasovskii functional for coupled differential-functional equations when the kernel operator is separable. Similar to the case of time-delay systems of retarded type, the inverse operator is instrumental in control synthesis. Unlike the power series expansion approach used in the previous literature, a direct algebraic method is used here. It is shown that the domain of definition of the infinitesimal generator is an invariant subspace of the inverse operator if it is an invariant subspace of the kernel operator. The process of control synthesis using the inverse operator is described, and a numerical example is presented using the sum-of-square formulation.
SC-Share: Performance Driven Resource Sharing Markets for the Small Cloud
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2017
Year: 2017

Small-scale clouds (SCs) often suffer from resource under-provisioning during peak demand, leading to inability to satisfy service level agreements (SLAs) and consequent loss of customers. One approach to address this problem is for a set of autonomous SCs to share resources among themselves in a cost-induced cooperative fashion, thereby increasing their individual capacities (when needed) without having to significantly invest in more resources. A central problem (in this context) is how to properly share resources (for a price) to achieve profitable service while maintaining customer SLAs. To address this problem, in this paper, we propose the SC-Share framework that utilizes two interacting models: (i) a stochastic performance model that estimates the achieved performance characteristics under given SLA requirements, and (ii) a market-based game-theoretic model that (as shown empirically) converges to efficient resource sharing decisions at market equilibrium. Our results include extensive evaluations that illustrate the utility of the proposed framework.
Exploiting Massive D2D Collaboration for Energy-Efficient Mobile Edge Computing
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2017
Year: 2017

In this article we propose a novel Device-to-Device (D2D) Crowd framework for 5G mobile edge computing, where a massive crowd of devices at the network edge leverage the network-assisted D2D collaboration for computation and communication resource sharing among each other. A key objective of this framework is to achieve energy-efficient collaborative task executions at network-edge for mobile users. Specifically, we first introduce the D2D Crowd system model in details, and then formulate the energy-efficient D2D Crowd task assignment problem by taking into account the necessary constraints. We next propose a graph matching based optimal task assignment policy, and further evaluate its performance through extensive numerical study, which shows a superior performance of more than 50% energy consumption reduction over the case of local task executions. Finally, we also discuss the directions of extending the D2D Crowd framework by taking into variety of application factors.
How much is Wikipedia Lagging Behind News?
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2017
Year: 2017

Wikipedia, rich in entities and events, is an invaluable resource for various knowledge harvesting, extraction and mining tasks. Numerous resources like DBpedia, YAGO and other knowledge bases are based on extracting entity and event based knowledge from it. Online news, on the other hand, is an authoritative and rich source for emerging entities, events and facts relating to existing entities. In this work, we study the creation of entities in Wikipedia with respect to news by studying how entity and event based information flows from news to Wikipedia. We analyze the lag of Wikipedia (based on the revision history of the English Wikipedia) with 20 years of \emph{The New York Times} dataset (NYT). We model and analyze the lag of entities and events, namely their first appearance in Wikipedia and in NYT, respectively. In our extensive experimental analysis, we find that almost 20\% of the external references in entity pages are news articles encoding the importance of news to Wikipedia. Second, we observe that the entity-based lag follows a normal distribution with a high standard deviation, whereas the lag for news-based events is typically very low. Finally, we find that events are responsible for creation of emergent entities with as many as 12\% of the entities mentioned in the event page are created after the creation of the event page.
Autocomplete 3D Sculpting
Venue: arXiv cs.GR 2017
Year: 2017

Digital sculpting is a popular means to create 3D models but remains a challenging task for many users. This can be alleviated by recent advances in data-driven and procedural modeling, albeit bounded by the underlying data and procedures. We propose a 3D sculpting system that assists users in freely creating models without predefined scope. With a brushing interface similar to common sculpting tools, our system silently records and analyzes users' workflows, and predicts what they might or should do in the future to reduce input labor or enhance output quality. Users can accept, ignore, or modify the suggestions and thus maintain full control and individual style. They can also explicitly select and clone past workflows over output model regions. Our key idea is to consider how a model is authored via dynamic workflows in addition to what it is shaped in static geometry, for more accurate analysis of user intentions and more general synthesis of shape structures. The workflows contain potential repetitions for analysis and synthesis, including user inputs (e.g. pen strokes on a pressure sensing tablet), model outputs (e.g. extrusions on an object surface), and camera viewpoints. We evaluate our method via user feedbacks and authored models.
On the Implementation of a Scalable Simulator for Multiscale Hybrid-Mixed Methods
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2017
Year: 2017

The family of Multiscale Hybrid-Mixed (MHM) finite element methods has received considerable attention from the mathematics and engineering community in the last few years. The MHM methods allow solving highly heterogeneous problems on coarse meshes while providing solutions with high-order precision. It embeds independent local problems which are responsible for upscaling unresolved scales into the numerical solution. These local contributions are brought together through a global problem defined on the skeleton of the coarse partition. Since the local problems are completely independent, they can be easily computed in parallel. In this paper, we present two simulator prototypes specifically crafted for the MHM methods, which adopt two different implementation strategies: (i) a multi-programming language approach, each language tackling different simulation issues; and (ii) a classical, single-programming language approach. Specifically, we use C++ for numerical computation of the global and local problems in a modular way; for process distribution in the simulator, we adopt the Erlang concurrent language in the first approach, and the MPI standard in the second approach. The aim of exploring these different approaches is twofold: (i) allow for the deployment of the simulator both in high-performance computing (with MPI) and in cloud computing environments (with Erlang); and (ii) pave the way for further exploration of quality attributes related to software productivity and fault-tolerance, which are key to Exascale systems. We present a performance evaluation of the two simulator prototypes taking into account their efficiency.
HVACKer: Bridging the Air-Gap by Attacking the Air Conditioning System
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2017
Year: 2017

Modern corporations physically separate their sensitive computational infrastructure from public or other accessible networks in order to prevent cyber-attacks. However, attackers still manage to infect these networks, either by means of an insider or by infiltrating the supply chain. Therefore, an attacker's main challenge is to determine a way to command and control the compromised hosts that are isolated from an accessible network (e.g., the Internet). In this paper, we propose a new adversarial model that shows how an air gapped network can receive communications over a covert thermal channel. Concretely, we show how attackers may use a compromised air-conditioning system (connected to the internet) to send commands to infected hosts within an air-gapped network. Since thermal communication protocols are a rather unexplored domain, we propose a novel line-encoding and protocol suitable for this type of channel. Moreover, we provide experimental results to demonstrate the covert channel's feasibility, and to calculate the channel's bandwidth. Lastly, we offer a forensic analysis and propose various ways this channel can be detected and prevented. We believe that this study details a previously unseen vector of attack that security experts should be aware of.
FairJudge: Trustworthy User Prediction in Rating Platforms
Venue: arXiv cs.SI 2017
Year: 2017

Rating platforms enable large-scale collection of user opinion about items (products, other users, etc.). However, many untrustworthy users give fraudulent ratings for excessive monetary gains. In the paper, we present FairJudge, a system to identify such fraudulent users. We propose three metrics: (i) the fairness of a user that quantifies how trustworthy the user is in rating the products, (ii) the reliability of a rating that measures how reliable the rating is, and (iii) the goodness of a product that measures the quality of the product. Intuitively, a user is fair if it provides reliable ratings that are close to the goodness of the product. We formulate a mutually recursive definition of these metrics, and further address cold start problems and incorporate behavioral properties of users and products in the formulation. We propose an iterative algorithm, FairJudge, to predict the values of the three metrics. We prove that FairJudge is guaranteed to converge in a bounded number of iterations, with linear time complexity. By conducting five different experiments on five rating platforms, we show that FairJudge significantly outperforms nine existing algorithms in predicting fair and unfair users. We reported the 100 most unfair users in the Flipkart network to their review fraud investigators, and 80 users were correctly identified (80% accuracy). The FairJudge algorithm is already being deployed at Flipkart.